Religion Quotes

Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

~ Douglas Adams

When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. That's my religion.

~ Abraham Lincoln

My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.

~ Dalai Lama Xiv

Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of man?

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Religion is like a pair of shoes.....Find one that fits for you, but don't make me wear your shoes.

~ George Carlin

Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.

~ Voltaire

All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.

~ Edgar Allan Poe

People, I thought, wanted security. They couldn't bear the idea of death being a big black nothing, couldn't bear the thought of their loved ones not existing, and couldn't even imagine themselves not existing. I finally decided that people believed in an afterlife because they couldn't bear not to.

~ John Green

I'm completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. ... These two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death.

~ George Carlin

Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.

~ Isaac Asimov

Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet. Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.

~ Napoléon Bonaparte

To terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creation—is that good for the world?

~ Christopher Hitchens

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.

~ G.k. Chesterton

Atheism is more than just the knowledge that gods do not exist, and that religion is either a mistake or a fraud. Atheism is an attitude, a frame of mind that looks at the world objectively, fearlessly, always trying to understand all things as a part of nature.

~ Emmett F. Fields

I think it's perfectly possible to explain how the universe came about without bringing God into it, but I don't know everything, and there may well be a God somewhere, hiding away. Actually, if he is keeping out of sight, it's because he's ashamed of his followers and all the cruelty and ignorance they're responsible for promoting in his name. If I were him, I'd want nothing to do with them.

~ Philip Pullman

If complete and utter chaos was lightning, then he'd be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armour and shouting 'All gods are bastards!

~ Terry Pratchett

If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn't help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we've got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don't want to do it.

~ Stephen Colbert

It is easy enough to be friendly to one's friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business.

~ Mahatma Gandhi

Religion. It's given people hope in a world torn apart by religion.

~ Jon Stewart

I want God to play in my bloodstream the way sunlight amuses itself on the water.

~ Elizabeth Gilbert

In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.

~ Carl Sagan

This is my simple religion. No need for temples. No need for complicated philosophy. Your own mind, your own heart is the temple. Your philosophy is simple kindness.

~ Dalai Lama Xiv

In truth,there was only one christian and he died on the cross.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge, which is power; religion gives man wisdom, which is control. Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals mainly with values. The two are not rivals.

~ Martin Luther King Jr.

Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.

~ Christopher Hitchens

How many observe Christ's birthday! How few, His precepts!

~ Benjamin Franklin

Alcohol may be man's worst enemy, but the bible says love your enemy.

~ Frank Sinatra

There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

One would go mad if one took the Bible seriously but to take it seriously one must be already mad.

~ Aleister Crowley

I wore black because I liked it. I still do, and wearing it still means something to me. It's still my symbol of rebellion -- against a stagnant status quo, against our hypocritical houses of God, against people whose minds are closed to others' ideas.

~ Johnny Cash

I challenge anyone to understand Islam, its spirit, and not to love it. It is a beautiful religion of brotherhood and devotion.

~ Yann Martel

I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow, it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally, I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time.

~ Isaac Asimov

Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light‐years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.

~ Carl Sagan

If there is any religion that could respond to the needs of modern science, it would be Buddhism.

~ Albert Einstein

Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour ... If at my convenience I might break them, what would be their worth?

~ Charlotte Brontë

Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian.

~ Herman Melville

Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it.

~ G.k. Chesterton

Imagine there's no countriesIt isn't hard to doNothing to kill or die forAnd no religion tooImagine all the peopleLiving life in peaceYou may say that I'm a dreamerBut I'm not the only oneI hope someday you'll join usAnd the world will be as one

~ John Lennon

Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute. Indeed, my experiments have proven to me that he is the Unreasoning Animal... In truth, man is incurably foolish. Simple things which other animals easily learn, he is incapable of learning. Among my experiments was this. In an hour I taught a cat and a dog to be friends. I put them in a cage. In another hour I taught them to be friends with a rabbit. In the course of two days I was able to add a fox, a goose, a squirrel and some doves. Finally a monkey. They lived together in peace; even affectionately.Next, in another cage I confined an Irish Catholic from Tipperary, and as soon as he seemed tame I added a Scotch Presbyterian from Aberdeen. Next a Turk from Constantinople; a Greek Christian from Crete; an Armenian; a Methodist from the wilds of Arkansas; a Buddhist from China; a Brahman from Benares. Finally, a Salvation Army Colonel from Wapping. Then I stayed away for two whole days. When I came back to note results, the cage of Higher Animals was all right, but in the other there was but a chaos of gory odds and ends of turbans and fezzes and plaids and bones and flesh--not a specimen left alive. These Reasoning Animals had disagreed on a theological detail and carried the matter to a Higher Court.

~ Mark Twain

We keep on being told that religion, whatever its imperfections, at least instills morality. On every side, there is conclusive evidence that the contrary is the case and that faith causes people to be more mean, more selfish, and perhaps above all, more stupid.

~ Christopher Hitchens